by Herta Müller
The razor cut says, as you see, your friend Paul doesn’t tell you everything.
* * *
It’s now dark outside, the poplar is gone. The lightbulb, the ceiling, the cabinet and the wall, the outlets and the door are reflected in the glass. A room shrunk into half a window, with no one inside.
* * *
So write down who it does refer to, says the birthmark. And the razor cut says, if we’re satisfied you can go. And if we’re not you’ll stay and think, says the birthmark. The razor cut clutches the file under his arm. The birthmark stands at the door and blows smoke out of his nose. You’ll think better on your own, says the razor cut. He spits on his fingertips and counts out five white pages. His light brown eyes are round and happy. There’s more than enough paper, he says.
By the way in that song of yours that doesn’t refer to anybody there’s a line I like very much, about night sewing a sack of darkness, says the birthmark.
The door closes from outside. The keys rattle in the door. The floor stretches out in the light. The cigarette smoke drifts to the dark window. Otherwise nothing moves: not the empty desk or the chair or the cabinet or the sheets of paper. Or the window.
* * *
It’s a contradiction, thinks Abi, that outside on the wet street, this window is nothing but a window. That every day and every night the world is divided into those who interrogate and torture and those who keep silent. And it’s a contradiction that one summer day, in a farmyard in front of a rusted bathtub planted with geraniums, right next to the beehive, a child asks his mother where his father is. And that the mother raises the child’s arm and takes his hand in hers and bends his little fingers and points one at the sky and says: up there, do you see. And that the child looks up for just a moment and sees nothing but sky while his mother stares at the geraniums in the bathtub. That the child sticks his outstretched finger into the narrow slit of the beehive until his mother says, don’t do that, you’ll wake the queen. That the child asks, why is the queen asleep, and his mother says because she’s so tired. It’s a contradiction that the child removes his finger because he doesn’t want to wake the tired queen and then he asks what his father’s name is. And that the mother says: his name was ALBERT.
* * *
Abi writes on the empty sheet:
KARÁCSONYI ALBERT
Mother MAGDA née FURÁK
Father KARÁCSONYI ALBERT
His hand doesn’t feel itself. Inside a dark half-window is Room Number 2. The lightbulb burns. No one is there. Only three names on a sheet of paper.
* * *
Pavel opens the door to a different room. A woman’s eyes watch from behind the desk. The woman is holding a pen. A sheet of paper is lying on the desk, blank except for three short names in crooked writing. Let’s see, says Pavel. He picks up the paper and reads.
His hands fly, the chair stumbles. The woman’s head bangs against the wardrobe. Her eyes stay big and rigid. The lower lashes are thin and wet. The upper ones thick and dry and bent upward like grass. The door shuts from the outside.
* * *
Inside the woman’s eyes the wardrobe is curved. The room is so still that the objects lie down in the light. The woman is lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe. Her shoe is lying under the chair.
Shrunk into a dark half-window, Room Number 9 is all lit up. And no one is there.
* * *
Pavel opens the garden gate. The birch trunks gleam against the black grass. His keys rattle in front of the house. Before Pavel can unlock the door his wife opens it from inside.
She smells of kitchen vapors, he kisses her cheek. She carries his briefcase into the kitchen. His daughter’s forehead comes up to his belt, the tip of his tie. Pavel lifts her up, Father your hair is wet, she says, and slides down his front.
Pavel opens his briefcase, the buckles are cold with condensation. He takes out a package of Jacobs coffee, a tub of breakfast margarine and a jar of Nutella and places them on the kitchen counter next to the television. A worker’s chorus is singing, he turns down the volume. He counts out twelve packs of cigarettes and sets them on the refrigerator next to the white porcelain dog. The head of the warehouse is out of town on business, he says, he’ll be back tomorrow, I’ll send someone to fetch the veal. He lays the Alpenmilch chocolate on top of the apples in the fruit bowl. One of the apples rolls off, Pavel catches it. His daughter holds her hand out for the chocolate. Her father asks, how was school. Her mother stirs the pot and says, no chocolate, we’re about to eat. And she looks at Pavel as she raises the spoon to her mouth and says to the quivering blob of fat, her grades aren’t going to get any better because of chocolate.
Pavel looks at the television screen. A woman and a man are standing in front of the workers’ chorus. They tilt their heads forward and scamper around with their feet, then tilt their heads back and scamper around with their feet.
I’ve been telling you for a month, says the mother, you have to go to the school and talk with the teacher. Everyone takes her coffee, says the daughter, except for us. And you can see that in her grades, says the mother.
She slurps the blob of fat off the spoon. On the television screen the man trips offstage to the left and the woman trips off to the right. Pavel drapes his jacket over the back of the chair.
The teacher’s not getting any coffee. At most a black eye. After I’m done talking with her she’ll be bringing coffee to us.
* * *
A drop of soup splashes onto the table. Veal my foot, says the mother. Maybe seven years ago it would have counted as a calf, but that meat’s been cooking for hours and still isn’t soft. That was an old cow. The daughter laughs and taps her spoon against the soup bowl. A parsley leaf sticks to her chin. The mother picks a bay leaf out of the soup and places it on the edge of the bowl. And my shoes won’t be ready before Christmas, she says. Actually my shoes are ready, just not for me. Today the school inspector came by the factory with his wife. She took two pairs. First she wanted brown, but changed her mind and wanted gray. Then she didn’t like the black ones and wanted white with buckles. The black ones were supposed to be mine, made of patent leather. But in the end those were the ones that fit. So now they’re hers.
The daughter has made herself a mustache from a piece of meat. Pavel licks a parsley leaf off his fingertip. And the inspector, he asks the mother. She looks at the daughter’s mustache and says, he told everyone that he has two corns, one on his middle toe and one on his little toe.
On the television screen the president of the country strolls through a factory hall. Two female workers present him with bouquets of carnations. The workers applaud, their lips open and close in time to their clapping. Pavel hears himself saying, there are black cars in every factory. And he hears Clara saying, but you don’t work in a factory. He reaches around and switches off the television.
The mother says, for three hours our director was kneeling next to the chair where the inspector’s wife was sitting. His eyes were watery and his mouth twisted and soft. His hands were two shoehorns, all they did for three whole hours was shovel her heels into different shoes. He could no longer straighten his fingers. And in between fittings he was kissing her hand. You should see her calves. Pavel pulls a fiber of meat from between his teeth. The daughter rummages through her father’s briefcase. She shakes three thick drops out of a perfume bottle onto her hand. Her calves are like a fattened pig’s, says the mother, no patent leather shoes are going to help that. She ought to wear rubber boots. The mother sniffs the daughter’s hand, Chanel, she says, then picks up the porcelain dog from the refrigerator. After that the workers acted out Director and Madame, says the mother, rolling their pants up to their knees and walking back and forth in high heels to show how Madame tried on shoes.
* * *
Pavel’s eyes are tired, the meat sticks to his fork. The daughter’s face is smeared with chocolate, which rings her mouth like dirt. She cries. Her father props his head in his hands, his for
ehead feels heavy. Stuffed handkerchiefs in their pant legs to show her calves, then climbed up on the table and draped curtains over their hair, he hears his wife saying. And at the same time he doesn’t hear her because he’s hearing the cornfield rattling in the middle of his forehead. And Clara’s voice saying, And what if I think the worst.
So then the director came bursting through the door, says the mother, and told them they could all expect disciplinary action. Including the women who were watching and laughing. Including me. Pavel hears Clara’s laughter in the middle of his forehead. He takes his wife’s hand in his own. She presses her mouth against his ear. The kiss floods his neck, his cheeks, his forehead. He hears his voice telling Clara, I don’t work at the courthouse.
His wife’s ear is next to his mouth like a young rolled-up leaf. I was planning on giving you the perfume this evening, Pavel says into the ear. And he doesn’t hear himself.
He hears himself telling Clara, I know what I know.
The razor blade
The stadium is enclosed by an earthen wall. The grass has been so eroded by the autumn that soil shows between the blades. Also rocks. The apartment blocks in the housing settlement beyond the stadium are squeezed together, from across the empty parking lot they seem no higher than the shrubs that reach up along the earthen wall—lilacs, mock orange and rose of Sharon that are never pruned because they don’t venture over the wall itself. The plants sneak into bloom early, and by spring the flowers have faded and summer growth is already well under way. But now they stand naked on the earthen wall, shaking their twigs and branches, unable to shelter anything from the gusting wind.
The long-distance runner over the entrance to the stadium is nothing but a picture painted on stone. But during the bare season there are no hurdles to slow him down. When the branches have no leaves, the long-distance runner is a winner. He looks down at the bread line in front of the store, at the screaming faces and the thick padded clothes, but he doesn’t feel hungry. Over the stadium the sun has turned away, a ring of milky white that gives no warmth. But the long-distance runner doesn’t feel the cold. With naked calves he runs overhead, past the little people and into the city.
A car pulls up to the parking lot. Two men wearing windbreakers climb out. One is young, the other older. They glance briefly at the blind sun. Their pant legs flutter as they hurry across the lot, their shoes shine. They’re eating sunflower seeds and spitting the black shells onto the well-worn path that leads them, the older man followed by the younger, between the garbage bins and mountains of empty boxes, toward the apartment blocks of the housing settlement.
* * *
The older man takes a seat on a bench, looks up at the windows and munches his sunflower seeds. Behind him, high up, is the window with the petunias. The younger man points out a window in a building on the other side of the settlement the same height as the petunias and says, that’s her apartment. One room and a kitchen. The room is in front, that’s where the fox fur is, the young man says, the kitchen is off to the side.
The wind sweeps over the bench. The older man rubs his legs and turns up his collar.
* * *
The younger man unlocks the door. His key does not rattle. He bolts the door from inside. He doesn’t trip over the shoes in the entrance hall, he knows exactly where they are, the sandals with the black traces of her toes. The bed is unmade, the nightgown folded on the pillow.
* * *
He goes to the window. The woman with the chestnut-red hair done up in big waves is standing behind her petunias. He signals to her with his hand. He crosses to the wardrobe, kneels on the floor. He takes a razor blade out of his jacket’s inner pocket. He unpacks the razor blade and places the paper wrapper next to his knee. He slices the right hind leg off the fox. Then he licks his fingertip and wipes the cut hair from the floor. He rubs the hair between his thumb and forefinger into a firm ball and drops it into his jacket pocket. He wraps the razor blade in the paper and sticks it in his inner pocket. He slides the cut-off leg back against the belly of the fox.
He stands up and checks to see if the cut is visible. He goes to the bathroom. He lifts the toilet cover. He spits into the toilet. He pisses and closes the cover without flushing. He goes to the door of the apartment and unlocks it. He quickly sticks his head into the hall and steps out. He locks the apartment door.
* * *
The petunias are whiter than the sun’s milky ring. They will soon freeze. The bench down below is vacant. The ground in front of the bench is strewn with sunflower seeds.
* * *
Two men walk along the well-worn path that leads them, the younger man followed by the older, between the garbage bins and mountains of empty boxes. They cross the parking lot. The shrubbery climbs the earthen wall, higher and higher, into the bare season.
A fox will step into a trap
The gateman paces up and down at the entrance to the factory, his coat draped over his shoulders. The sun casts a cold light on his face. As he waits to inspect the bags he eats sunflower seeds. His coat drags on the ground.
* * *
Mara comes out of the main shop floor, having brought three knives for David. The blades are freshly sharpened. David uses one to cut through a bacon rind and doesn’t wipe it off. So the gateman won’t see it was just sharpened, he says, placing it in his bag. He puts the other two knives in the drawer, I’ll take one tomorrow and the other the day after, he says.
Eva rinses out the water glasses, her fingers squeak on the wet surface. The dwarf doesn’t have to sweep the hall today, says Mara, so he’ll be one of the first to get to the showers, we better hurry. Anca grabs her purse without buttoning her coat.
David buttons his coat and takes his bag.
David walks to the gate carrying the greasy knife in his bag. Mara, Eva and Clara walk past the giant spools into the rear yard, a flock of sparrows comes fluttering out of the wire. The attic window below the edge of the roof is ajar.
Clara feels a knot in her throat, her tongue rises to her eyes. She gags, her eyes lose focus. When she looks up, the attic window is a string of windows suspended in the air. Mara and Eva are far ahead, past the spools, perhaps already on the rungs of the iron ladder.
* * *
At least for a few more days, as long as the sun casts its cold light on these stairs even just for a moment, the eyes of the three women gather in the attic window every afternoon at four o’clock. Soon the sun will no longer touch the staircase at all. It will move across the wall, dull and pale, in far too narrow an arc. And then for months the steam in the little hallway outside the shower will be so blindingly thick no eye can see through it. The women’s curiosity does not subside right away, for another few days it climbs into the women’s heads and the women keep climbing the iron rungs. They crowd around the window, waiting in vain for the light that no longer comes. By the time the first men enter the shower the sun has already stolen past the wall. The women look at one another. They turn around, jammed so close together they seem to have no arms. Then they give up. Mara quietly closes the attic window and slides the little rusty latch. For several months the window will stay locked.
* * *
Down in the yard Clara bends over, props her head against a wire spool and straddles the rusty path. She vomits bread and bacon. Her hands are cold, she wipes her mouth with her handkerchief. She glances up at the attic window, Eva’s and Mara’s heads are a blur, Clara can’t make out their faces. The striped cat sits down twice between Clara’s shoes, eating what she threw up, even licking the wire. Her stripes come floating out of her fur.
* * *
Adina leans against the bare acacia by the factory entrance, the wire spools are stacked higher than the fence, smoke rises from the gatehouse chimney but does not fray above the crooked street, the gray wool rises and then falls back on the roof. The wind carries steam from the brewery, the air smells like cold sweat, the cooling tower is cut off by the clouds.
* * *
Two weeks ago the officer’s wife gave the servant’s daughter a coat with a fox fur collar, with two legs for tying under the chin. The legs have little paws and brown, shiny claws. The steam from the brewery smells like the fox collar, which had made Adina sneeze. The servant’s daughter said it was naphthalene. If a fur doesn’t smell like naphthalene, she said, come summer the fox rot will eat right through the pelt. And then the hair doesn’t just fall off one strand at a time, it stays on the hide as though it were still growing and waits. Then just when you go to pick up the fur it comes off in big clumps like sudden hair loss. And you’re left holding a bare hide, like skin on bones, all covered with tiny sandy grains, with grit. The servant’s daughter smiled and fingered the paws of her fox collar.
* * *
Clara approaches the gate. The gatewoman is holding the cat on her lap, stroking its striped fur. David’s knife is on the table, the gateman saw that it had been freshly sharpened in the factory. The gateman’s coat slips off his shoulder, his hand sticks Clara’s gummed-up handkerchief quickly back into her purse. A truck rattles through the gate, the wheels rattle as it moves onto the street, and the stacked wire spools rattle above and below as well. The driver’s face jiggles in the rearview mirror. Farther away is the white curtain of haze from the brewery. Through the rattling Clara hears someone calling her name.
* * *
Adina walks through a cloud of dust. Her kiss lands just under Clara’s eye, her hands are blue from the cold wind, her nose is damp. Let’s go to my place right away, she says, I have to show you something.
* * *
Clara bends over and picks up all the pieces of the fox fur, gray light falls through the window. The empty table is dark and shiny. Everything I need to eat is in the kitchen, Adina says, bread, sugar, flour. Clara runs her fingertips over the fox’s tail, then over the cut on the leg. They can poison me whenever they want, says Adina. Clara sets the fur back on the floor. Without taking off her coat she sits on the unmade bed and stares at the gap between the fox’s belly and its right hind leg, at the empty band of floor the width of her hand. She shoves the tail against the rest of the fur, it looks as if it were growing there, the cut is completely invisible.